Out of the Vault: Billy Woodberry in Person

March 22–29, 2023

Filmmaker Billy Woodberry presents two nights of his moving-image work and the annual Les Blank Lecture on documentary film.

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Bless Their Little Hearts
And when I die, I won’t stay dead
Marseille après la guerre

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And when I die, I won’t stay dead
Billy Woodberry
United States, Portugal, 2015
Wednesday, March 22 7 PM
Les Blank Lecture by Billy Woodberry
Billy Woodberry’s “daring and accomplished documentary” (New Yorker) of Bob Kaufman, one of the most overlooked of the Beat Generation artists, is lovingly assembled from archival footage, documents, and interviews. With an homage to Ousmane Sembène’s Black Docker.
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Bless Their Little Hearts
Billy Woodberry
United States, 1983
New 35mm Print
Wednesday, March 29 7 PM
Billy Woodberry in Person
“Billy Woodberry’s dramatic feature looks deeply into the life of one family in Watts and plots its crisis in three dimensions: race, money, and gender. . . . Woodberry crafts a passionately pensive realism” (New Yorker). With The Pocketbook, an adaptation of a Langston Hughes story.
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Out of the Vault: Billy Woodberry in Person

March 22–29, 2023

We are delighted to welcome filmmaker Billy Woodberry to present two nights of his moving-image work and the annual Les Blank Lecture on documentary film. For decades he was a part of a community of filmmakers in Los Angeles: an actor in Charles Burnett’s When It Rains, a film narrator for Thom Andersen and Noël Burch’s Red Hollywood and James Benning’s Four Corners, and a longtime professor at CalArts. His first feature, Bless Their Little Hearts, is a portrait of both Black Los Angeles and being Black in Los Angeles; his protagonists see “their identities mirrored and distorted in the world around them” (New Yorker). It was written and photographed by Burnett and shares actors with other filmmakers associated with the LA Rebellion movement that arose out of UCLA in the late 1960s to early 1980s. Two years after Bless Their Little Hearts was named to the National Registry in 2013, Woodberry completed his portrait of neglected San Francisco Beat poet Bob Kaufman, And when I die, I won’t stay dead, originally envisioned as a short film inspired by a tribute to the poet after his death in 1986. Josslyn Luckett noted, “The life of the Afro-diasporic literary mind lives in his films,” from Langston Hughes, whose short story he adapted for his first film, to his recent homage to Ousmane Sembène’s first novel and his recovery of the life of the poet Bob Kaufman. She continued, “Woodberry has remained committed to telling this history [of Black ‘literature, lore and history’], imagined and lived, through a subaltern lens.”

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Curated by Kathy Geritz. Out of the Vault is presented with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Les Blank Lecture is presented with support of the Les Blank Fund. With thanks to Billy Woodberry; Edith Kramer; and Steven Hill, Todd Wiener, UCLA Film & Television Archive.